"Early Saxon and Romano-British basing" Topic

This may be a cart-before-the-horse question because I have no rules in mind… but I wondering how best to create units for these two armies….. units organized by weapon and/or type – as in "Oh look! there's a unit of spearmen, and over there, some armored axemen" or mixed bag – unarmored spearmen mixed in with armored spearmen, axemen, swordsmen, etc. into one unit.

Well, you really should think rules first.

That said I have my later Saxon and Normans grouped by Armor and quality of equipment more than weapon.

This is primarily due to the Heavily armored and or better dressed guys tend to be "elite" while the less armored are just "heavy" infantry in the rules I use.

The poorly dressed and poorly armed (maybe no shield for example, or just a staff) tend to be based as horde and rabble.

I also group my Dark Ages armies by armour/equipment; they usually have a mix of weapons. I do though group archers together

I suspect that every armored warrior of means had the earlier equivalent of a squire or retainer with lesser equipment close by. I doubt they fought by units organized by quality of kit but more on a clan or community basis. Huscarls might be the only exception being essentially the full time professionals who would be better equipped and perhaps also fighting as a single body but I would expect they had quite a few retainers mixed in as well.

For gaming terms, I would say it was what level or sort of equipment predominates, not that it is completely uniform.

I agree with Aethelflaeda.

A 'unit' would probably consist of a big nob plus his various kin, retainers, hangers-on, etc. What kit they possessed was irrelevant.

I feel it is unlikely that if Uncle Brian didn't have a mail shirt he would be sent away to go and stand with all the other blokes from the shire who had no mail shirts…

Huscarls belong to a much later era.

I suggest that you base with armoured types predominating in the front rank and unarmoured in the rear.

I use DBx and ADLG as my rules of choice so basing is by element of a single type of troops. That said there is no reason why a base of, lets say Anglo Saxon HI spearmen, shouldn't have a mix of types in it provided it is still easily identifiable as HI spearmen.

As others have said rules first then basing choices will follow automatically.

"HI"?

Is that Heavy Infantry?